By MARSHA MERCER
Earl Long, governor of Louisiana in the 1940s and ‘50s,
quipped: “When I die, I want to be buried in Louisiana, so I can stay active in
politics.”
The line is good for a groan, but election fraud is no
laughing matter. Our system of government relies on citizens’ believing that
our elected officials hold power legitimately.
Election fraud is almost nonexistent, studies have
found, and yet nearly every presidential campaign brings dire warnings that the
election is about to be stolen.
Republican presidential nominee John McCain claimed before
the 2008 election that Acorn, a group that organizes low-income communities,
was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter
history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”
Donald J. Trump is the latest to conjure election fraud.
Not waiting for November, he is preemptively laying the groundwork for a “we
wuz robbed” excuse for losing to Hillary Clinton.
“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged. I have
to be honest,” the Republican presidential nominee said Monday at a rally in
Ohio. Republicans need to be “watching closely” or the election will be “taken
away from us,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News.
“The voter-ID
situation has turned out to be a very unfair development,” he told The
Washington Post Tuesday in an interview. “We may have people vote 10 times.”
Trump has a habit of seeing a stacked deck when things
don’t go his way – and even when they do. During the primaries, he railed
against Republican Party rules he said were rigged against him, even though the
rules were set before he entered the race -- and he won handily.
Bernie Sanders also complained the system was rigged
-- against him and in favor of Clinton. In Sanders’ case, however, Democratic
National Committee emails leaked last month backed up the claim.
Candidates preach to the converted about a rigged
system. The 2000 election debacle in Florida fueled lingering cynicism. More
than half the voters believe the way parties pick presidential candidates is “rigged,”
a Reuters/Ipsos poll found in April.
Trump now claims Clinton and the Democratic Party
rigged the presidential debates to fall on NFL game nights – even though an
independent commission, not the political parties, set the schedule. The
debates were scheduled in September 2015; the NFL schedule was set in March
2016, PolitiFact reported.
Election fraud is the rationale for tough new state laws
requiring photo IDs to vote. Thirty-two states have voter ID laws, and 18
require photo IDs.
In the last few weeks, however, federal courts have
ruled against five state voting laws, suggesting in some cases that the
supposed cures for fraud actually would rig the system against minority voters.
North Carolina’s 2013 law targeted black voters “with
almost surgical precision” and was “one of the largest restrictions of the
franchise in modern North Carolina history,” an appeals court ruled.
A federal judge blocked North Dakota’s voter ID law
from going into effect, saying it made it hard for Native Americans to vote. He
cited “a total lack of any evidence to show voter fraud has ever been a problem
in North Dakota.”
A federal appeals court in Texas ruled that state’s
voter ID law discriminatory and ordered a lower court to come up with a
temporary fix before November.
A federal judge told Wisconsin to change its
procedures and make it easier for voters to get IDs so they can vote. Kansas
must count the votes of thousands of people who didn’t show proof of
citizenship when they registered to vote.
In the judicial pipeline
is a voter ID case from Alabama, scheduled to be heard in federal court next
year. In Virginia,
state legislators and the governor are fighting over voting rights for 200,000
felons.
While some may joke about dead-people voting and
ballot-box stuffing, we can’t forget that in many places elections truly were rigged
against minorities for more than a hundred years with poll taxes and literacy
tests. In the 21st century, we need to work together to ensure
integrity and fairness at the polls.
We can’t allow any candidate to destroy the legitimacy
of our election simply because he fears defeat.
©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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